This is Reimagining The Future of Higher Education from Studiosity. Your go-to podcast with remarkable education leaders, sharing personal stories from their experience in and around the sector, including reflection and evidence for progress in the sector. With your host, Professor Judyth Sachs, former DVC Learning and Teaching at the University of Sydney, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost Macquarie University and Special Advisor in Higher Education at KPMG and now Chief Academic Officer at Studiosity.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Let me introduce Professor, Dr. Paul LeBlanc, the President of Southern New Hampshire University. Paul, rather than my introduce your extraordinary achievements. Can I get you to introduce yourself?
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Oh. Oh, sure. I will tell you the part that I feel like my work is most rooted in, which is that my family immigrated from Canada to the United States, and we lived in a very, I was born in a very sort of hardscrabble, subsistence level farming village and what some people would call the French Appalachia. So even though I was born in the 20th century life, there was very much in the 19th century. So, you know, no running water, late to electricity, people still had outhouses. And it was a place where the men would go off to work for long periods of time because there was no local work and women were left behind to raise kids and kind of keep the farm going. So we emigrated for the classic reason, right? An uncle had moved to the US and called back and said, There's jobs here and you can do better. So my parents sold that farm. So I was the, my parents had eighth grade, my father an eighth grade education. I think my mother only had a sixth grade education. When we immigrated it was the classic story of they work multiple jobs. My mom worked in a factory, my dad was a day labourer and they cleaned people's homes on the weekends to make extra money or in the evening. And I learned to read English when my mother plunk me down in the library in these fabulous, beautiful homes in Western Mass, which I think is still the highest per capita income in the Boston area. And she would put kids books in my laps and and for her and my family, it was the children of those families that went to college, not the people in our neighbourhood. But it was you know, because I was a reader, I guess, or whatever someone saw promise in me and my mother recalled right till she died at 96, the conversation with my sixth grade teacher who said Paul could go to college someday. And it was like a lightning bolt that hit her. And she held that dream for me, which means I got that dream from her. So I was the first in my family, first in my neighbourhood, first in my extended family to go to college. And it's changed the whole trajectory of my life. And I'm a very sort of a very shlucky version, if you will, of our unapologetically sacrem version of the American dream. But I feel like I've lived it and my two daughters have lives that my parents could scarcely imagine, and it's because of affordable, high quality, higher ed. So SNHU's story is really trying to make sure that that dream is now available to the young, you know, Haitian immigrant, to the young Dominican immigrant, to the 45% of Americans who today say they would struggle to come up with $400 for an unexpected car repair. And they say that at a time when our wealth and equity is greater than it's been since before the Great Depression, and when too many people feel left behind by a higher ed system that doesn't serve them very well. So that sounds like a very preachy introduction, Judyth, and I apologise right out of the gate, but I really do feel a very deep emotional and ethical commitment to the mission of this particular university. We don't do a lot of things that universities take pride in. We're not a research university. We're not a university that has big time American football programs that are on television on Saturday. But I think on this score, I think we're pretty well respected for being very innovative and service of that particular mission.
"So SNHU's story is really trying to make sure that that dream is now available to the young, you know, Haitian immigrant, to the young Dominican immigrant, to the 45% of Americans who today say they would struggle to come up with $400 for an unexpected car repair."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
You've been in role for 20 years, but before you, your first presidence, I read in one of your books, your first presidence was a very small institution. In fact in business terms, I'm surprised it was a going concern for as long as it was.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
It is, it is no longer sadly.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Exactly. Exactly. But when you came to Southern New Hampshire, you had, I think it was 6,000 students.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
2,500 at the time.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And you've built it to 160,000 students.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
185,000 as of today.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
You just can't keep up with Wikipedia can you?
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
We need to update our page. But yes, we continue to grow.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
How did you do it? I mean, that is remarkable.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah, well, thank you. I mean, I think it was at a time when I came in 2003. Online learning was growing, but it was growing in the US context, mostly through for profits, really, because most nonprofits looked down their nose at it. They thought it was inferior quality. How can it be as good for students if they're not in a classroom with me was sort of a typical faculty conceit at the time across much of the country, and you know, they might not have been wrong. Clay Christensen, a famous Harvard Business School professor who coined this phrase of disruptive innovation and more, was a dear, dear friend of 40 years and was on my board and he often, if you remember, if you know, his work, would say, when you have a new disruptive innovation, it actually almost is always inferior to the incumbent service or product. But it gets better really fast. And I think, you know, when we launched and started to grow online in 2003, 2004, five, six, we had a lot of pretty pedestrian work to do, kind of what I would call under the hood. Like, our business processes were cumbersome. We weren't well designed for the people who needed online. That wasn't an 18 year old coming out of high school. Our students were 30 year olds with three kids, a dead end job, credit from when they tried college before, maybe not successful, maybe they did a stint in the service and now they're stuck and they needed this postsecondary credential to unlock an economic opportunity for themselves and their family. So they often felt urgency, would have super busy lives. So we had to come up and really think hard about what Clay calls jobs to be done, which is when someone comes to you and they write a check, that hard earned money to pay you for, in our case, an education. What job are they really asking for? And for our students, we get very focussed on what we call the four c's. So they were, they needed to be convenient. That is, they have busy lives. Like if you ask them to race from work, get to a campus for a 6pm class. They're eating a fast food dinner in the parking lot. They may be missing their kids who are already in bed when they get home. But when we could say, No, no, no, go home, go to your kid's soccer practice, have dinner with them, help them with their homework, tuck them into bed, make a cup of tea. And when you log on at 9:30 now, you can be a student for the next 2 hours and you don't have to feel like you've sort of surrendered your duties to your family or otherwise. So we made it very, very convenient. In fact, we were fiercely and remain mostly asynchronous, which means that you don't have to be on at a given time because one of my revelations along the way here has been that time is a source of structural inequity. Low income learners have less time than the rest of us. Like If you don't have a washer dryer in your apartment, it just takes you longer to have clean clothes. Something I never think about. Like I throw a load of laundry in on the way to get a cup of coffee. But that's not a privilege they have. And for big swaths of the American workforce, at least, you may not even know what your schedule is next week. So how do you commit to being on a campus at a certain time? So we're very personally asynchronous because we think it's really important. And so the first one was convenience, the second was cost. I'm not making enough money as it is. Can you make it affordable? And in the American context, that's a big question mark. We, we saddle our students with $1.7 trillion of student loan debt in America, second only to home mortgage debt. Third one was credential. Can you give me a credential that actually makes a difference? Does it tie to workforce demands and needs? Will it allow me to better my life? And then the last c is completion time. In other words, I'm doing this because I feel urgency. So do you have transfer credit friendly policies? Will you take more of my credits from my previous schools than this other provider will? So we get very focussed on those questions. Those four questions don't very much come up for traditional residential universities that serve high school students in America. So I think we got, we grew because we got really focussed on what people actually needed and then we had an opportunity, which is that during the Obama administration and full disclosure, I did a stint in that administration for the Department of Ed, but during that administration they really targeted the for profits who had lapsed into some pretty terrible practices and abuses. So that, so think about it here we were kind of getting the product right, if I can use the term product, the major competition, the people who had the biggest share of the online market and remember, for profits educated a full 12% of all American college students at their height. Phoenix University had 500,000 students at its height, they're down to about 75,000 today. But but no, they were out there on their back heels, on their back foot. Right. They were sort of laying low. And we didn't have a lot of not-for-profit competition. They were still looking down their noses. So we had a lot of open runway. And I can still remember, Judyth, a slide we brought to the board, we said it was a picture of a window with the shutters and we said the shutters are open, they will close someday. Online will start to be accepted. The for profits may come back. A whole bunch of things may happen. But for now we've got some chance to really grow. And we invested and we got very aggressive. The other thing that happened was that in 2009, the recession hit full force. We were still larger on campus. We were getting larger online, but we were, the campus still dominated the conversation and we were still having to take every program we wanted to bring online and bring it back to the faculty for approval. Slow, they often dragged their heels, governance as you know is just inherently slow, many of them reluctant. You'll cannibalise my program, it can't be as good. And because we had suffered through the recession, some program cuts may have cut some positions, which we had never done before. We were looking at an operating deficit. We were able to negotiate, renegotiate our governance. And what we were able to do is say to the faculty we will never take a program online without talking to you first so you don't get a veto. You get to raise your hand and tell us your concerns and we will address those. And if we are not satisfied, here's the process we'll adjudicate it, but it won't drag on, it's 30 days and then the provost will decide. We never had a case go to the provost. But we were able to address concerns and that allowed us to grow really fast. So, you know, when disasters happen, it's usually a perfect storm of things that went wrong. When big successes happen, it's kind of the opposite of fact. It's a whole bunch of things that happened at just the right time for us. So in 2012, in the list of 50 largest non-profit providers of higher ed, online higher ed, we were number 50. So we were at the very bottom of the list in 2012. Three years later, we were number four, in those three years were a rocket ride. I mean, we were onboarding 40 new full time staff every Monday, like every Monday we had another 40 people showing up. We had boxes of computers in the hallways. IT couldn't unbox them and set them up fast enough. We couldn't order enough office furniture quick enough, so we had people sharing card tables. It was, you know, and we broke everything. We had no idea what we were doing. We did not know how to scale, Judyth. And honestly, in some ways it was the three most fun years of my career.
"In fact, we were fiercely and remain mostly asynchronous, which means that you don't have to be on at a given time because one of my revelations along the way here has been that time is a source of structural inequity. Low income learners have less time than the rest of us."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
I can imagine.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
It was just fun. It was blowing up and it was like, Holy cow, every day was another problem we had to solve. But students were really well served and they came to us in droves and then we never looked back.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So will there come to a stage when the optimal size for the university. So 185,000 from Australian perspective, and our universities are large compared to the English, 185,000 is massive.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah, I know. It's funny because I was giving a talk to the Irish Higher Ed Authority and I think Ireland has 150,000 students total. And I was like, Look, if you guys want to save a whole lot of money, we'll just take them all for you, I'm being [inaudible] of course. So for me, it's never a question of a number. It's a question of do I see evidence that we are starting to slip, that we're serving students less well, that we can't continue to be You know, we have a net promoter score that would be the envy of most companies. And when we asked students and recent alums if you had to do it over again, would you enrol in SNHU, by the way, to make it easier, we all just say SNHU. Would you roll in SNHU or would you would you recommend us to a family member or a friend or a colleague, and something like 92 to 93% of our alums and our current students would say they absolutely would come back to us. We feel very proud of that. If I saw those pieces slip, because the thing we've been really trying to solve for is how do you give someone a highly supported, personalised feel of their education at scale? Like that is a very hard thing to do both. Scale is up, feeling like I'm well taken care of as an individual, that's easy. I can make you feel very cared for and really struggle with scale and expense. And what we've been able to do is a advising centric model, very relationally centric model at scale. And I think that's, if you asked what is the magic of the model, in many ways that's the magic of the model.
"92 to 93% of our alums and our current students would say they absolutely would come back to us. We feel very proud of that. If I saw those pieces slip, because the thing we've been really trying to solve for is how do you give someone a highly supported, personalised feel of their education at scale?"
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So it becomes personalised?
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Yes. So if someone once said to me and I think it's been a useful framing that all organisations have to be good at three things. Like you can't compromise, you have to be good at operations, you have to be good at product, and you have to be good at people. Most organisations, so that being true every organisation has to declare which of those three they're going to be outstanding at, because that's going to be the thing that drives success. So Amazon operations, people not so much like I'm not sure you want to be an Amazon employee, but boy, do they do operations better than anybody. Products, Apple computers. You know, every time I open my Dell laptop on an aeroplane, some 20 something rolls her eyes and things like, Ok, Grandpa, like got a cool computer someday, right? Like everyone loves the sort of panache of Apple's genuinely beautiful design. Like, it is lovely design. And if you were looking at people, you might say, Oh, the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons Hotel or in America Zappos shoes right. There shoes aren't cheap, but their customer service is amazingly good. I could tell you stories about it. We sent people to study it. So most of higher ed plants its flag in product, like we will talk about our programs and our curriculum all day long. And institution after institution operates with the conceit that their introduction of general psych is better than everyone else, or that their program, their MBA program is so different than everyone else's. I don't think that's true, but it is the mythology that we have built and, you know, think about the resources we put into how many faculty meetings, how much time is spent in looking at program design, we have a good academic program, right? We said you have to be good at everything. We have to be good at academics. We plant our flag on people, which means which is that we actually absolutely centre the relationship of our academic advisors to our students because at our size you go from faculty member to faculty member to faculty member, you may not have a sustained relationship. You may never see that faculty member again just because of sheer numbers of people we employ. But your advisor stays with you for the whole of the experience. They know and we call them academic advisors but Judyth, it's 20% academics, it's 80% life coach. Think about who my student is, right? Like, Oh my God, I don't know if I could do college work, I wasn't good at it ten years ago. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's talk about the supports you need. They're the ones who know when you're having a rough patch at home. They're the ones who know when your boss is being a jerk, right? They're the ones who celebrate your successes with you. And to be an online learner, to be at your dining room table at 10pm at night when your spouse is in the other room watching your favourite show and you wish you were doing that instead of studying stats, it can feel a little bit isolating. The flipside of being asynchronous is I'm not in with the same class and we're not in class together, right? So the fact that that advisor is there for you, proactive, undergirded with a very powerful CRM. We're fanatic about data. We have 70 people on our data analytics team. We measure everything. I know when you've been on, I know when you've struggled with an assignment, I know when you're late for something. As your advisor I'm armed with a lot of information, but it's so that I can be in relationship with you. Sometimes I know before you do, when you get a bad grade on an exam and I, and I don't wait, I don't wait for you to wave your hand. I call you. Like Hey, Judyth, what happened in your stats exam? Like you've been killing it. And you might say, Oh, my God, like week from hell. My kids were sick. The boss was a jerk. My wife was travelling on business like I didn't even study. But don't worry, I'll get it together. I already talked to my professor, he's going to let me take another exam or give me extra credit, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm like, Okay, Judyth, is good, she's just had a bad week. But I might call, I might call you and have you say, I don't know what I was thinking. Like, I don't have time for this call just killing me. And then I say Judyth take a breath, look at your performance up to now, you've been great, what's going on? Stats is hard. It's hard for everybody. Let me, have you got a tutor yet? Ok I'm going to set you up with a tutor, with a stats tutor. Right. Like I'm going to get your resources and cajole you and encourage you. And that can be the difference between losing one of my students and keeping them. My students are fragile learners quite often, not because they're somehow less able, because their life is hard, right? They don't have the same level of social capital, they don't have the same level of confidence. They can easily be thrown, that $400 car repair example I used to open, that happens all the time. We created a $5 million emergency fund from micro grants and sometimes a $600 emergency grant can be the difference between someone being with us tonight, tomorrow and with us two years from now, and graduating with that degree, the changes their life. So yeah, so critical to our model is relationship and people and I think it's interesting because I think AI is going to force everyone to think hard about the importance of what people have to know to be an X, fill in the blank, to be an accountant, to be a lawyer, or to be a doctor. What they have to know and and what they have, what they need to do with what they know, which is not something higher ed spends a lot of time thinking about and also maybe perhaps shifts the spotlight to more ontological questions of being. How are you as a human being? You know, and I don't know if this is true in Australia, but right now we have an absolute crisis of mental health, not just for our students, but across our society. 70% of young people report acute loneliness. The CDC issued a report two months ago that show that 25% of American adolescent girls have planned their suicide in the last 12 months and 30% have attempted. This is, this is not like we have a challenge on our hands. This is, we have an absolute crisis on our hands. And I think, you know, we're having a lot of conversation about how do we start with mental health and well-being, and then think about what people have to know. And for most universities in higher ed, it's the reverse. Like. that's a, that's a secondary question that we hope you don't have to face and you have some resources to deal with it. It's like, I don't think that's an option right now.
"We're fanatic about data. We have 70 people on our data analytics team. We measure everything. I know when you've been on, I know when you've struggled with an assignment, I know when you're late for something. As your advisor I'm armed with a lot of information, but it's so that I can be in relationship with you."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So with, with the advisers, having been a provost myself workload was always, and managing the unions was part of the, part of my job. What's how is the workload allocated for advising?
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah so, critical here, critical question. It's a great question, thank you. So the rule of thumb in online learning in the U.S. is about 300 advisors to an advisor. An important caveat to that is, it's not 300 new students because new students take a lot of time. So you have this kind of load balancing where you want to think about, I can do a hundred new students who need me to be engaged with them. There's a lot of hand-holding. We know when we get students past the first four, five, maybe six courses they get their feet under them. Like now they've got their cadence, their confidence. They know how to be a college student again. So you want another 100 of those and then maybe my last hundred are people who are like on the homestretch and they're just like, what are my graduation requirements? Like when, am I going to see you at commencement. So that's really critical. To give you some sense of context, there are American community colleges with ratios, 1 to 1600. There is no advising going on. Right. Nothing is happening. We, during the pandemic actually have made a very expensive investment, $22 million hit to our budget to reduce our advising loads from 300 down to 185. And the reason we did that is because we are in fact seeing such challenges with our students, you know. If you think about who I described as our students, you know what else they are. They're frontline workers. In the pandemic they're the ones who are stocking grocery shelves and delivering and driving trucks and they're health care workers, nurses. And they don't, they don't have the, they were disproportionately impacted. And a lot of our students, we have 30,000 students of colour, larger than the largest HBCU, historically black college university in the US. Communities of colour were disproportionately impacted, their death rates and infection rates were higher. So one of the things we saw with our advisors is they were dealing with stuff they had never dealt with before, like they, they were having people put in their laps, things that they weren't prepared. So we did a number of things. We did trauma informed counselling training for all of our advisors because they were seeing trauma. You know, they had nurses getting on calls with them after a terrible day describing heartbreaking scenes. Right. Like holding the iPad up in your PPE so that someone could say goodbye to their dying spouse, like horrible stuff, and they didn't want to go home and share that with their families. So who did they share it with, their life counsellor, advisor. Our advisors were like, I can't breathe. So that's one of the reasons, so we did that training and counselling. We, we did we reduced their, their caseload so that they could just have more time with people and more time for themselves and try to bring in more supports across the board. And, you know, look, we operate from a fundamental assumption here, and it's the flip side of the old saying, which I'm sure you know well, which is hurt people, hurt others. Right. But the flip is true. When we take really good care of our people, they take really good care of our students. And I'm really proud of the fact that Southern New Hampshire University is the only university in the US that has been on the Chronicle of Higher Ed best colleges to work for list, every 16 years since its inception. There's no other college or university in America that can say that. And we've been on the honour roll, which means you are rated in the top ten in a number of categories every year since the honour roll was created, which I think was 11 years ago. And I think it's a, and I'm proud of it because, and it's not a bragging point, it speaks to the way we take care of our people. And I think as a result they're very dedicated to our students.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Can I get back to transformation? And I'm interested to know where the genesis of your, your approach to transformation, was it through your own undergraduate experience? Was it through well, what, what, what helped to shape your, your approach to transformation?
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
You know, so I'm glad you asked the question because I think forever I would have answered that question by pointing to a set of professional experiences, you asked a very good question, is it something about your own undergraduate experience. And I think that's where my sense of mission comes from, right, because of I had amazing teachers and it changed my life, as I described earlier in our conversation. But I think part of it is rooted in the culture of my Canadian background. So the Canadians are a strange little French-Canadian subculture that, you know, wouldn't swear allegiance to the British and wouldn't swear allegiance to the French so they shook them off to Louisiana. And people sometimes know them today as Cajuns. That's just a local phrase for Canadians. But they're stubbornly anti-establishment, like they're terrible rule followers. And we did, you know, we did some kind of personality profile assessment here with my team. And my HR director was teasing me because she guessed that my, one of the questions or one of the things you get rated on is your, your kind of willingness to live within establishment bounds or rules. And she said my score was going to be a one. And I was proud to say she was, I was double, I was better by switching gear because on a 100 point scale, I was only a two. So I know, like if you, if you told me like we can't do a thing, my natural reflex of like why? Like, let's figure it out. Like, of course we could do that. So there's a little bit of something that goes right back into my family roots. And then I think I was really fortunate to be a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts, just as PCs and local area networks were taking place. And I saw like this profound change that could happen. And it was funny because at the time the faculty, the full time faculty looked at these things like, we're not going to work with those, like, go find someone else to do it. So who could they order to do it? The graduate students. We were just graduate assistants, like you guys figure it out. And we did. And I was a writing teacher and I saw changed student behaviours. I could do things that I couldn't do before with technology and I was really intrigued by it. So really that shifted my work away from traditional rhetoric and composition studies to really looking at technology and literacy and got very, very interested in that. So at that point, so some combination of excitement, enthusiasm for this new world of technology and curiosity and a desire to play by different rules. I think I just started doing this work more naturally. Yeah. So it's you know, it's always for me, often if you ask people in the US context, you know, list the most innovative universities in America almost invariably SNHU will be in the top five. But I also have to say it's like it's not innovation for innovation sake. It's innovation to serve people better than the incumbent models serve them today. Like innovation for innovation sake is just sort of an intellectual recreation, but this is something different. So when we created our new CBE competency based education program, it was very pioneering. It was the first of its kind in the US. Look, I will say this by saying Western Governors University is the paradigm of great CBE but we did this program that no one had done before where we didn't have any courses, we didn't have any credit hours, we untethered from time. And you made your progress by demonstrating mastery of competencies on your way to a degree. And, and we use that program still today with refugee learners in the most compromised, challenging places in the world, like like Kakuma refugee camp, largest refugee camp in Africa, 200,000 people, it's been there for over 22 years or whenever. It's a hard, hard place of [inaudible]. And and we have refugee learners with a partner on the ground inside the camp who are doing amazing work, and that's changing their lives. They get jobs with NGOs or in Rwanda they have a right to move so they can actually get jobs with Rwanda and employers who scoop them up. 98% of our refugee learners in Rwanda are hired at graduation, and with that, they move their families out of the camps. We're in Lebanon where people have no right to work and we're working with organisations to do remote employment. And I think that those are the models and they're really about, they're really about meeting students where they are and understanding the job that has to be done for them. Can I take a minute and just tell the story, I wrote a book called Students First, which is really about CBE, and I opened the story and I'll tell it very quickly, with this woman named Mariam. She is African-American from the poorest neighbourhood of Boston, Roxbury neighbourhood, single mom, little girl. When I met her, she was seven with chronic respiratory illness, very little family around her, very little social capital. And every time she got sick, her little girl got sick. Excuse me. She would miss 7 to 10 days of school, she would fall behind on assignments, fall behind exams, get another F, or get another withdrawal if it was early enough in the term. So if you looked at her transcript, you'd say, God, this Mariam's just not ready for college. She's not right for college. When we put her in our competency based program with no tethering to time, so anytime she needed to hit the pause button, she could. She had a great line, she said I set the schedule now and it's like, Yeah, you do, it's like when you can be a student. She raced to her associate's degree in record time, and today she's almost done with her bachelor's degree. She was really smart. She's very hard working. We didn't have a higher ed, student wasn't right for higher ed. We had a higher ed that wasn't right for the student. So our innovation is always about how do we get to be in that second category. Right models for the right students in the right place. Sorry. That sounded very self-righteous and preachy and I didn't mean to, but when you see the impact, it's hard not to be excited about what's possible.
"And I think that those are the models and they're really about, they're really about meeting students where they are and understanding the job that has to be done for them."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Well, look, I've recently read your latest book, Broken How Our Social Systems Are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them. And in that book, you say that success in education involves something more than belonging. You use the concept of mattering. That is, an individual has to believe that their story matters to the institution and that their voice can and should be heard. In other words, the key is a two way relationship whereby both parties are invested in successful outcomes. Can you just elaborate on that and help me understand where, where the genesis of that idea was as well? Because it's radical.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Well, it's radical, and we both know it's true. So if I were to ask, you know, when you think about the people in your lives who are most transformational. If I ask you about the most transformational moments in your life, you almost always cite a person, a teacher, or a coach, often we'll cite our parents, of course, in our earlier, especially in our earlier years. I love the work of a woman named Donna Beegle, who does work around extreme poverty. It was a great line, she says. No one who escapes extreme poverty cites a program, a system, a government policy, or an institution. You know what they always cite, they cite a person, someone who believed in them and help them, active sponsorship. So we often use belonging. I think, we want students to feel sense of belonging. And it's a, it's a term like I like mattering better because I belong to many things that don't make me feel like I matter. I write a check to any number of professional associations. I belong to them. They send me a journal that I value. I go to their conference. I don't know that they know me. I don't know how much I matter to them. But when I talk about matter, I'm using the term as Greg Elliott, a really wonderful sociologist at Brown University, uses and I interviewed Greg for my book and he would say mattering means three things. Mattering means that you know me, you have, I have a sense like, Oh, you actually do know who I am beyond labels. And so much of our work with CRMs and databases today put people into nice little neat boxes. And no one's a neat box. No one's not even like three neat boxes, we are messy. We carry multiple narratives, multiple stories. Everyone has baggage, right? Everyone has complexity. If I say, look, I have a student, really interesting student, 30 years old, he's got a couple of you know, he's he's he's got some credits from other schools and he's African-American and he's low income. That's a story. And I can start to make some inferences around that. But I said, oh, by the way, he also did three stints and he's coming to us through the Veterans Administration because he's being treated for post-traumatic stress. Now, my narrative is more complicated, so oh, by the way, he's also gay. Whoa. Okay, my narrative got more complicated. That's not an unusual story, lots of people work right. So mattering, according to Greg, is, first of all, you really know me in my complexity. Second one and holistically. Let's use that term. Second is that you invest in me in some way. Now, the easiest investment or the one we all know is time. And you can't short change that long. Like anyone who we say changed our lives, they invested time in us. For me it was I have a number of faculty. It wasn't about what they did at the front of the classroom. That was never the thing that made me feel like I mattered to them. What mattered to me is the time they took outside of the classroom, they are having coffee with me and asking me about my dreams and my aspirations and and and counselling me on my, my career or whatever else. So the second one is that you invest and that could be money investments. And the third and it's the one we often miss is that you give them some level of agency so it feels like they have impact back on you. So I talk about this in terms of our employees here at SNHU. We really work hard to know them and support them. We invest in them. We do training programs and we have award winning benefits. There's a reason why they were the best college to work for. But the third is if they give us feedback, if we're listening and we're active listening as an organisation, and they never, and they never see the impact, they never feel like it changes anything, then they don't start to feel like they matter to us anymore. It doesn't feel right to them. So mattering is a very rich piece of it and it should lead to a second piece and the second chapter of the book, as you know. Thank you, by the way, for reading it, that's the best compliment anyone could give me, is that they spent, gave me some of their time, is on aspiration because for everyone who transforms a life and I write about systems of carers, those which transform lives K-12, higher ed, medicine, mental health, counselling, substance, those are all about transforming lives. You have to lift people's sights. You have to give them a sense of, you have to help them dream bigger dreams. You have to give them hope again. And I interviewed Matt Beal, who's one of my favourite interviewees in the book, and he's the head of Child and Adolescent Psychology at Georgetown University MedStar Centre. And I asked Matt, I said Matt, when you think about why some people get out and they said, get out of what, get out of the morass and get out of the terrible dysfunctional neighbourhoods they're in, get out of the family that is so broken you wonder like, how could anyone survive it? But there are people who rise above it. What, what is true about that? What is true about them when that happens? He said three things. Lots more complexity, but the heart of it, three things. Number one, they have some passion that you can hook into or that drives them or that pulls them out of that situation. It can be anything, right? So for a poor inner city kid, it could be they love basketball or they love music or they love fashion. It doesn't have to be academic necessarily, but it could be that they want to be an astronaut. They like looking at the stars. Second thing is that they have one, ideally, one year of normal, or at least some sense that what they're in is not normal. This isn't good. Ideally, they've experienced it. So like if I am without a home, if I am homeless or shelter less, if I can remember what it was like when we did have a home and what it was like to have my own bedroom, it was like to have heat and to have a meal on the table. If I have a vision of this isn't, I don't have to live like this, this isn't normal. But the third and most important thing, and it goes back to mattering, is that you have one person who believes in you, who believes you are better than this. And, and I think that's the power of relationship. And when I interviewed Jessica Benjamin, the very famous feminist psychologist at New York University, or Matt Steinfeld at Yale, another psychologist, they beg the same point. Jessica has this concept she calls thirdness. But the point they make is that you can't transform someone if you're not in relationship with them. And to be in relationship with them means you give of yourself. So the professional distance that a lot of faculty hold on to, I actually think works against the effectiveness of education. I understand where it comes from, but the faculty, the question I ask my wife that led to the beginning of this book, I was musing over this one night and I said, I wonder if higher education can learn to love its students again. And she said did it ever, kind of being a little bit snarky with me. I said honestly, when I was an undergraduate, if love means feeling like I mattered, feeling like people were investing their time in me, feeling like people cared about how I was doing. Feeling like people were worried about my future then, yeah, I felt loved. I had faculty who did all of those things for me. And I think, I think you can't do that at a professional distance. That's why I think if you look at the research on high impact practices, undergraduate research, where undergraduate students who work with a faculty member on a common project remember just because thirdness, so thirdness is success with this project, but we are together and the teacher is sometimes the learner and the learner is sometimes the teacher, it's so powerful. The research is unequivocal. It changes student lives and not just because they get a line on a journal article, but because I was in it like Professor Sachs and I did this cool project in the lab and we had this breakthrough. Right. And and we celebrate that together. And I do think that's, that's the critical thing. And we've lost too much of that, particularly after the pandemic.
"Mattering means that you know me, you have, I have a sense like, Oh, you actually do know who I am beyond labels."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
I also read your blog and I think that you've said it's a couple of months since you've made a contribution to your blog, but this was you'd just read the book by John Bridle Ways of Being.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Oh, love that book.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
It changed, it changed your life.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
It did. So that must have, that's a recent one because I just, I just, I just read it, just finished it like ten days ago. And I've recommended, I've bought it for so many people.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Yeah. So what, what was it about that book that was so impactful for you?
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
A number of things. And I think honestly, it gave expression to something I was increasingly feeling. So you have clearly run out of things to read Judyth, if you're reading my stuff so much, but I'm very grateful thank you. But I wrote about it, I wrote a long blog post about a trip I did to Antarctica in January, which was almost a spiritually transforming experience. And part of that, what was transforming about it was the sense of connectedness, both being humbled by the place but also feeling incredibly connected. I was same time reading Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree, which is a wonderful book, and she is the scientist, I emphasise scientist, who really discovered this notion of what some people have called as the wood wide web, the way in which forests are interconnected with a kind of sentience. We dare say, she dare says, are a kind of intelligence, it's just not an intelligence we recognise through our umwelt. My new favourite word, which is our way of experiencing the world. So we can't, we literally can't know what it is to experience outside of our own experience. Words can't capture it. It can help. But she does this wonderful job, you know, and she discovers things like, you know, typically there is a sort of dominant mother tree that tends to the forest through the sort of web of and I can never say the word, [inaudible] tell me what it is. But the sort of, sort of web of sort of fungus that sort of all nutrients pass through. And it's kind of a remarkable book. And and then another book called An Immense World, which was also a bestseller last year, which is about the kinds of intelligences, sentience I daresay again, that so many animals have, but they're different than the way we think, right. So all of that gets summed up in James work as a philosopher and an artist who talks about the various ways of being and ways of being that are, in fact, sources of wisdom, that our Western binary way of thinking about the world doesn't leave much room for, at a great cost to us. And that cost is being paid out in a dying planet, it's being played out in the inequities of the world, etc.. And he raises this in the context of AI because we have a choice we can make. We have multiple choices we can make. And in some ways it's a hopeful book, but it's a book that argues that if we do with AI what we did with social media, which is a very much a capitalist, dominant, monopolistic understanding of the technology run by very few people, you get what happened with social media, which is we paid a terrible, terrible price. We did an international experimentation on our children and they are now showing the effects of that. We undercut our politics in a way that played out in America. And still today, I would argue, probably our most precarious time since our Civil war. We've seen disinformation, we've seen the effects of whatever good came of social media, I think much more bad, it was interesting, Igave I made this point at a conference with 300 university presidents and I said, raise your hand if you think that social media has been a a net negative, every hand in the room went up, no one had their hand down. And I think it's going to make social media look like a day at the beach in comparison. And what Bridle is arguing for is, it is still within our reach to redefine and make the right choices to acknowledge the multiple ways of being in the world, the multiple kinds of knowledge that are available to us, and to have an AI that is, again, human-centred, nature-centred and, and works better than because I don't think anyone looking around or reading the paper would argue that what we have today is working very well.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Well, my last question is, what next?
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Uh AI. So part of what we're announcing here within SNHU and I've talked about it internally a little bit, is that I am handing off more and more of my day to day operational responsibilities to my university provost. We have hired George Siemens, who we hired him away from the University of South Australia and the University of Texas, he had a joint appointment. I think George is probably the leading researcher in AI and education. He has joined us to help lead our AI efforts and I'm going to spend more time now thinking about what would it be in the spirit of James Bridle's book actually, what would it be to create an AI first university that centres relationship, connection, and community? So it's not about, so when I say AI first, I don't mean it takes precedence. I mean, what if you could build the foundation and the systems to take all the friction out of the system, to give students 24/7 help, to do, to be much less rule bound? Because if you think about it, we have standard operating procedures to protect us against the unanticipated risk. And what AI does is it gets better and better and better at predicting where the risk is. So it allows us to move away from rule based ways of operating to prediction based. So what if I could make a better bet on, I know now with much greater certainty which program Judyth needs to be in because I know about her in ways that give me insight and now I can make better, she can make better decisions and I can give her better advice. So could we take all the power of AI in that network of networks? Because that's what AI really is. It's about spanning networks of networks, and do that in a way that centres human wellbeing, connection, community, and learning, that I think is so, so what we're trying to take is that the essential SNHU model and really kind of put it on steroids. And I'm going to work closely with George and the board and I are talking about that later this week and we're going to make a substantial investment. We're standing up a whole new organisation to do this because this century is rolling out AI today, like that's happening all over the place. But those are point solutions. And what we're proposing over here is a clean piece of paper, top to bottom system redesign. And really, as you can tell, it makes me very excited to be doing this work as I, you know, realistically, I don't know how many more chapters I have at age 65 in my career, but it would really be nice to, this is the sort of next, maybe even final chapter to really try to reshape what what can higher education look like and a much more enlightened understanding of how AI could help us be better at what we do. Democratised, helping people who are left out of the system, and really changing the world.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And what a, what a great way to finish our conversation because many of the conversations I'm hearing about AI is dystopian. Yours, yours is not dystopian, but it's not naively utopian either. It's, it's, it's actually rational. It's thoughtful. And I look forward to observing how it progresses.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Thank you, Judyth. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honoured that you would include me. I'm really, really pleased to spend the time with you.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Well, I'm honoured that you agreed to have the conversation. So we can have a mutual honour society.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Okay, perfect.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Enjoy your evening. Thank you very much, Paul.
Dr Paul LeBlanc:
Thank you very much, good bye.
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